Never been one to let the carrier drop

There has to be some better way to handle streaming audio. Oh, right, there is, UDP, but it won’t go through NATs. Where’s my TCP-with-no-sliding-window-and-no-guarenteed-arrival-order?

I’ve recently installed the latest build of kplaylist and a flash streaming player. As a result (and due to carelessness on my part), all of my kplaylist users got lost. If anyone out there (including people who weren’t previously on my kplaylist user list) wants access to my kplaylist, drop me a line. Currently we have 17,265 tracks – I’m shooting for 20,000 by the end of the year.

I wish I knew more about selling short.. I bet I could make a fortune short-selling every spam stock that goes by. 😉

Lately someone is truly obsessed with SHTP – apparently some individual-shots-in-plastic-baggies product. I get like 20 spams a day about how I must buy SHTP right now.. and every once in a while, for amusement, I look at SHTP’s stock quotes. It’s, um, falling like a rock.

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1759

I recently noticed in a wikipedia article about easter eggs that Microsoft – once one of the largest producers of software with easter eggs in the biz, has stopped permitting easter eggs to be written into their software as part of their ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative.

Well, as if I needed more reasons to hate m$, but..

I hate the concept of ‘enterprise computing’. It basically says, let’s sell the same buggy software for ten times as much while making sure that we don’t put any jokes in the manual. We all should take our computing sooo seriously.. it plays into the mental model that computers are not toys, that big business and making money are far more important than enjoying your life or having fun, and that anything cobbled together by a bunch of hackers on the net can’t possibly be as good as something cobbled together by a few hackers in a building somewhere that’s then had a brand name slapped on it.

They’re taking away our easter eggs in the name of fighting cyberterrorism. How far are we going to let the suits go in their pursuit of trading joy for big profits? These people need to be stopped – which is why I’m calling out for all software developers everywhere to sneak a few dozen easter eggs into every product, and all auditors to look the other way..

Oh, yeah, *that*’ll happen.

Seriously, though, am I the only one who thinks this preoccupation with ‘enterprise grade’ solutions – which, let’s all be honest, break just as often as the duct-tape-and-perl-script variety (and if you think otherwise, you either aren’t in the industry or you’re covering your arse) – is somewhere between silly and stupid? I have a client who hates mysql because it’s not ‘enterprise grade’, even though it’s every bit as reliable as Oracle and for the particular task he’s doing, every bit as fast. These people carefully ignore that a number of the biggest sites on the internet.. the wikipedia for ${diety}sake.. are running LAMP! It’s amusing to see how fast the higher-ups turn pale when words like ‘open source’ are spoken. I can only imagine what would happen if I were caught writing easter eggs into things.. (which, now that I’m aware that they’re under fire, I will make sure I wedge into every major app I write from now on)

Of course, I’m basing this all off a wikipedia article that might not even be correct.. (that’s the problem with encylopedias that anyone can edit.. or encyclopedias that *anyone* can edit – yes, even Britannica is wrong in spots..) but, it does sound like it fits the current Climate Of Fear ™. Nothing scarier than a few easter eggs – after all, they mean that clearly the types with no sense of humor and no interests other than money aren’t completely in control of the code…

Actually, thinking about it, who *are* you going to trust? People who stick video games into your word processor, or people who think that sticking video games in your word processor is a untrustworthy action? As usual, I know which side I’m on..

Sometimes I wonder.. as I’ve mentioned many times before.. how many job opportunities I lose because of my blog.. ah well. Until I actually *am* starving, I’d rather not work for those who take themselves so seriously anyway, so the job loss is mutual. I hope.

(in case anyone was wondering, I got this fine quiz at http://www.rdos.net/eng/)

(and it says:

Your Aspie score: 111 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 75 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

)

(that title was intentionally intended to catch Google’s attention)

After trying many, many things to get Samba and XP to peacefully coexist, I tried the registry changes listed in http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2820556.html and found that the one that fixes the problem is the one described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321098

… or not.. (the problem appears to have returned)

I always wondered what these were…

So, last weekend me and Kayti built a 2100′ extension cord.

my gallery has pictures, for those of you who doubt. The setup is thus: There’s a annual party in a certain abandoned train tunnel that will not have it’s location mentioned here (although, I suspect the people over at Molecular might know where it is). In prior years, we’ve just run generators in the tunnel, because a convenient 20mph wind has been blowing through. This year, due to a collapse at the end of the tunnel that we *don’t* enter at, we were forced to reconsider the location of the generator. The party is traditionally held after the first of three air baffles in the tunnel, for accoustic reasons. This unfortunately is 1950′ in.

For those of you who weren’t aware, you can’t just plug 1950′ of 12-gauge extension cords into each other and plug them into a 110V outlet at the mouth. 12 gauge wire has a drop of 0.00187 ohms a foot – or 3.74 ohms for 2000 feet. That’s *per leg*. At the end of the line, a 20 amp load would cause, let’s see.. hang on. I don’t believe the value I keep getting here…

Okay. You all get the point. We needed 5kW at the other end of the tunnel. So, I bought a couple of matching transformers on E-bay.. (where else can you buy 480V-> 220V CT transformers for less than the cost of a good dinner? The shipping and handling costs were kind of brutal, though).. and me and Rich (of Manzanita Micro) spent some time building spider boxen, breaker panels, cable-tying all the wire together.. and then we went and installed it all in the tunnel..

it was like being on the fscking *grid* in there. The lights didn’t dim on the bass beats – the transformers barely got warm.. I was seriously worried that all of these things that I knew worked in theory wouldn’t actually work in the real world – but, no, it came off mostly without a hitch. (well, aside from a neutral wire that pulled out while the stuff was being dragged into the tunnel and got put back int he wrong place.. luckily they caught that before anything big got plugged in, but I understand they set fire to a powerstrip or two)

Anyway, I figured that building a 2100′ extension cable earned us some bragging rights. They say that’s how the (insert your favorite college, ethnic group, religion, or whatever you like to diss) are building their electric car.. unlimited range, but *man* you need a long extension cord.4

I’m not actually sure I have free will. The decisions that I make are driven by the state of my bloodstream, and by the inputs I’m being fed. There is no way for me to know what I would be in a vacuum. I can’t seem to shrug off the past, either, it weighs me down like a anchor..